The Survivor
by Kaery91
Summary: After the Great Battle, the RDA was defeated and all their employees left Pandora. All but one. One had just survived the crashing of a Samson and wasn't anywhere near a radio when the call went out. Stranded, he settled in for a long wait... (Possible AU, since no one really knows Eywas limits)
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar, nor would I ever claim that. So, if you see something in here that you know from the movie or the game, its probably not mine._  
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**Well, this is my first story... So be nice, etc., etc. If you find any mistakes, please do point them out to me.  
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A few years after the Great Battle and the following eviction of all RDA personnel, rumors were heard about a sky-person in the jungle. It was said that he was clad in plants and very stealthy even in comparison to skilled Na'vi hunters. They were at first disregarded, until the day on which a hunting party came too late to rescue a small group of playing children from a raging palulukan.

They could only watch, at first in terror, then surprise and wonder, as a part of the underbrush stood up, assumed a humanoid shape and defended the children. It had about the height of a sky-person, but its form was composed of bark and leaves. It shot spikes and whirled about the large predator until he retreated. Only a scant few of the spikes had missed and the being had acted in complete silence. Over the roars of the palulukan, only a slight rustling of leaves and the whizzing of the flying spikes had been audible. Afterwards, it gave a small bow in the direction of the still-concealed hunting party, a wave and a smile with a bark-covered face to the children and vanished between the trees.

Although they tried, they couldn't find any trace of it on later days, but the remaining spikes and the tracks of the large palulukan served as evidence of the incident.

Half a year later, a child that had been missing for days showed up at her clans Hometree and told her story of getting lost after a nasty fall from a cliff and being shown the way back by 'a wandering bush'.

Over time, several clans began to tell stories of similar incidents where a well-concealed stranger either saved single members or, in rare occurrences, a larger group from mortal danger. The 'fnu tirea' or 'silent spirit', as the being became known, never lingered where it was seen. It never talked, but was always polite in giving a wave or bow before vanishing once again.


	2. Chapter 1

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

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Several years earlier: The Great Battle

I was looking through one of the side-doors of our Samson, internally cringing at the massacre our soldiers brought upon the natives. Why they had ordered the medics to be held in reserve was a mystery to me. The wounded were out there, not here in the Samson, but then... if one was hit by the 7-feet-long, poisoned arrows the other side used, one was dead anyway...

Well, I was once one of the employees of the RDA here on Pandora. My name is... was Darren Barton and I was a mechanic/medic who didn't have the luck to be overlooked when the higher-ups went looking for soldiers to attack the Tree of Souls. I was with the support troops, hanging back to help the wounded and repair the occasional malfunction from one of the AMP suits or their guns.

The natives didn't even have the slightest chance against our fire. Occasionally one or two got close enough to launch an arrow and kill one out of the masses of infantry the RDA had sent, but those were just pinpricks where a hole would have been needed. It looked like this battle was already over.

But then, just as the natives began to retreat, all hell broke loose. It started as a massive wave of heat signatures on the screens, but when the giant beasts came into view, I nearly soiled my pants. It looked like the fauna itself had turned against us. Giant hammerheads made short work of our AMP suits when they reached the line, infantry being slaughtered by the smaller viperwolves. The line wavered and started to break, support Samsons all around us beginning to lift with the intention to at least save the copters where the suits and soldiers had already been lost. Before the pilot could lift our Samson, a native on the back of a thanator bounded past the copter. She saw me and aimed her bow, but just as she released, her mount stumbled and the arrow vanished above me. Then she was away and our ride finally lifted from the ground and broke the canopy of the jungle.

Up here, it was only marginally better, Scorpions and Samsons ripped into by riderless mountain banshees, a steady rain of steel, fire and broken bodies falling down into the jungle.

I looked around and saw a small group of Scorpions flying away between the damned floating rocks that dominated the airspace this far into the Halleluja Mountains. "Hey, Jack! Retreat on 9 o'clock! We'll try to meet those others for our way back!" My headset hummed a bit before Jack, our pilot, sent the affirmative and turned the copter around. Coming around the edge, we just saw the tail of the last Scorpion vanishing behind the next cliff, the swarm of banshees staying behind us at the site of the aerial ambush. Circumventing the cliff, I heard Jack swear through the headset, just before the Samson fell into a steep dive. The group of retreating attack-copters was in the process of being scrapped by another large swarm of banshees and Jack was apparently trying to hide by flying in the narrow gap between the upper branches and the floating masses of rock.

It worked, but when we came out of the field of rocks and floating islands, we didn't have any clue as to where we were or in which direction Hell's Gate lay. That damned flux vortex was still strong, even out here and those wonky instruments were no help when one tried to orientate oneself. Also, fuel was running low, we wouldn't have the luxury to just fly out until we reached the boundaries of the vortex. As Jack steered the copter higher to have a better look at our surroundings, I spied a long, but quite narrow clearing down the side of a hill in the distance. Remembering a report from last week, concerning a landslide that had buried one of those field-labs the eggheads where placing all over the jungle, I told Jack to head there. The RDA wouldn't let simple earth take their investments, so they had surely sent a dig and recovery team to unearth the lab. If we were able to reach them, we would have a chance to refuel and we should be far enough from the vortex to find our way back home.

About half the distance was behind us when the whine of the turbines above me suddenly spun up to a high-pitched whistle, just before a sharp "**Bang**" rang out. The Samson immediately started spinning and tumbling. I grabbed the nearest handholds and chanced a look out of the side-door, Jacks swearing assaulting my ears. We were trailing a fair bit of smoke and a few feet away, burning brightly and rapidly growing more distant, was one of the two rotor-pods, which normally held the Samson in the air.

The next few seconds were filled with swearing from Jack, smoke from the hole in our copter and the bright flashes when the side-doors aligned with the sun during the tumbling. When the first crashes from breaking branches began, shredded leaves were added to the mix and gave the air a green hue. Then, a bone-jarring impact shook the wreck around me, my hands were ripped out of the handholds and I saw the floor of the cabin rushing at me. There was a sharp pain in my head and the darkness claimed me.


	3. Chapter 2

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

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The crackling of a fire was one of my first impressions as I slowly regained my consciousness. Trying to open my eyes was like trying to lift weights of lead. The blurry images of brown, green, and one big, dark blot didn't seem to be worth the hard work at first, but the blurriness soon resolved itself and I could look around.

I seemed to have been thrown free from the wreckage as the Samson came to rest upon a giant branch only a few feet above me. It was slightly bent in the middle and its tail curled downwards, almost like it tried to hug the tree-limb. The canopy of the copters cockpit was bent inwards and pierced by two large, broken branches. I could only hope that Jack had survived that and found one of the emergency masks in time.

I looked around for the source of the crackling and the smoke. The one remaining rotor-pod had folded itself up against the base of a tree a few yards away. Its small oil tank seemed to be the source of the fire. Small flames licked at the trunk and burning oil was dripping from the ruptured tubes inside the mess that had once been the flexible joint connecting the pod to the copter.

This Samson would likely never fly again.

Trying to stand caused pain to flare up virtually everywhere, but I didn't seem to have any broken bones. Otherwise I was fairly battered, bruises and small cuts were nearly everywhere across my body. Next priority was getting inside the copter and looking for Jack. If he had survived the unexpected stabbing of his cockpit, he would probably need medical assistance.

When I got inside... Let's just say that he hadn't survived the sudden intrusion of two branches into his seat. It was not a pretty sight and I'm just happy that as a medic at Hell's Gate, I had seen worse. Because puking isn't that easy with these masks.

Soon after that discovery and my putting out the fire, I realized that I would still have to make the trip to the landslide. Now more than ever. I would need gear though, the jungle was, and is to this day, not a good place to be when one travels on foot. Looking around the crash-site revealed a lot of things that had been shaken from the wreck in its descend.

The copter had been stocked with lots of replacements for nearly everything a fighting force would use and that was not counting the medical supplies that had been on board. But most of the crates had been opened when they fell from the copter and collided with the trees on their way down. It wasn't easy to find the scattered contents and I cursed my decision to remove the freight lashes with the idea that I would get faster at the most needed things, if the need arose. Our hasty retreat hadn't given me the time to re-secure the crates and so they had fallen out when the tumbling had started.

I found one of the crates for medical supplies lying upside down in the underbrush. It was still closed, even though the contents had been badly shaken around. At the other side of the crash-site lay another crate that was still intact. I took several extra energy cells as well as a few filters for my exopack from that crate. After all, I couldn't know how long I would be traveling.

Other things were useful too, a compass, a few extra cases of ammo for my wasp revolver (surprisingly, that had stayed with me on our way down, I hadn't secured it in its holster), the first-aid kit (stocked up from the med-crate), a few lengths of rope, Jacks combat knife and bits and pieces of the slight body armor the infantry wore.

After draining some of the fuel left in the tanks, as I would probably need a fire along the way, I started of into jungle. I had just left the site when the wreck ignited behind me. I don't know how, or why, but there was no explosion, just a quiet '_foomp_' and the whole copter was burning. After a few seconds of standing rooted to the spot in surprise, I decided: "At least this way, you won't end in the belly of some beast. Goodbye, Jack." With that, I turned again and left for the site of the landslide.


	4. Chapter 3

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

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I had had quite a bit of free time at the base due to my specializing on the mechanics of AMP-suits, which where quite resilient against the pandoran environment. I only got real work when another Na'vi attack had occurred. And even those seldom went for the AMP's, it seemed to be rather difficult to hit, and penetrate, the canopy of the drivers compartment while under heavy fire by infantry and other suits. In that free time I took to reading. And since the novels I brought with me were finished after only a short time, I began borrowing books from the others. Even that source ran dry after a few months, the occasional ISV arrival bringing only short reprieves. One could only bring a limited amount of baggage and books were usually not very high in the priority list. Soon, I took to reading the database the eggheads were compiling about our environment, a habit that could become very useful for me now.

For example, I knew that the viperwolfes, a pack-hunting predator who is quite dangerous for anything not well armed, very agile or heavily armored, were more aggressive during the night. Dawn broke shortly after my departure from the crash-site, most of the day had been spent at the battlefield and on our escape from it. The consequence: I decided to not spend the night moving towards my destination. Instead, I climbed a tree and curled up on a branch for the night. It wasn't easy to find one that wasn't connected to the surrounding trees by nearby branches or hanging vines. After setting a few trip-ropes to warn me if anything tried to climb from below or jump from above, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning, a tug from one of the ropes woke me. A few branches above me sat an ape-like, blue and green creature with big eyes. When it moved after a few seconds of 'stare-at-the-strange-visitor' I saw that its arms split at the elbows to form two forearms and the corresponding hands. A 'prolemuris', the database had listed it as not dangerous, but you never knew with pandoran animals. Just as I was finishing that thought, the prolemuris drew one of its arms back and threw some sort of fruit right in my face!

It was quite squishy, but thankfully didn't rupture, I had enough trouble with re-aligning my mask. It had been knocked askew from the force of the impact. The beast seemed to think that funny, it produced a 'chirr'-ing noise almost like laughter and threw two more fruit! One, I was able to deflect with my forearm, the other was aimed to high, struck the branch above me and fell down into the backpack I had used for a pillow during the night. I had enough.

"Hey! Stop that, will you?!" I screamed, well aware that it probably wouldn't understand me. It cocked its head at me, chirruped questioningly and then turned and using its long arms, swung away into the trees.

Slowly calming down, I collected my ropes, ate some of the emergency rations from the backpack and looked the fruit over. It had a more rigid shell than the other two that hit me, probably the reason why it hadn't burst in my pack. It was egg-shaped, mostly green with random blue dots and two thick, brightly yellow bands around its middle. Like most pandoran fruit it was larger than my hand, almost as long as my forearm, but somehow it fit perfectly into the top half of my backpack.

I decided to keep it for now, despite its size it wasn't that heavy and maybe I could eat it later, if my rations ran out and I would still be searching for the landslide. Even though I hoped that I would find the way before that happened.

I had been walking for several days, always spending the night somewhere save from the aggressive predators, when I heard the sound of Samson rotors approaching. Soon, I could discern that there were two of them, but before I could climb a tree to make myself noticeable, they had passed me. They came from the direction of the landslide, probably carrying a part of the dig team to be rotated back to Hells Gate. Nobody was always at the outposts, even the most hardiest mercenaries wanted a break from the near constant vigilance one had to maintain while being outside of the base.

This just reassured me that the lab was indeed being excavated and spurred me on to an even faster pace.

Two days later,in the afternoon, the dense jungle suddenly ended. Like a knife, the landslide had cut down the foliage and even uprooted the larger trees. In front of me began a stretch of ripped soil devoid of any vegetation. It was about two hundred yards long before the dense green jungle took over once again. To my left the clearing thinned out and ended in the area where the slide had lost its momentum. Several large trees lay broken and splintered against the bases of others that bent under the weight of their brethren and the dirt had gathered around these barriers like a stream of water frozen in time while passing through some rapids.

To my right was the slope where the landslide had originated. The clearing continued for hundreds of yards up the hill and about halfway up, I could see the tents the dig team had erected.

When I reached the camp, running the entire way in my elation at being finally, finally safe, I found it strangely silent. Nobody was inside the tents, nobody was at the dig-site. When I found the improvised landing pad empty, I had to face the harsh reality: This camp was deserted.

I sank to my knees in despair, this had been my last hope. But when I looked up, my eyes fell on the tall radio-pylon that spread its antennae high into the pandoran air. They had to have a radio here and I could use that to call for help. Still, a group of RDA-employees wouldn't just leave their camp. There was no sign of battle or a large animal, so they had to have left on their own accord.

Where had they gone and why?


	5. Chapter 4

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

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Finding the tent was easy, it was the one where the big cables from the mast went to. Activating the radio inside was a small problem, at least until I realized that the camps generator had been shut down. The real problem was keeping my sanity when I heard the male voice floating from the speakers: "All RDA employees on the surface of the moon Pandora are required to return to Hells Gate immediately. This branch of the RDA is being closed down and all employees will be moved off-world. I repeat: All employees are to return immediately to Hells Gate." This message repeated itself with an interval of about fifteen seconds. It was about two and a half days old. By now, the last shuttle would have left. I sank to my knees once again. I was probably the last human on this moon.

A quiet sound made me start. I realized that I had been staring at nothing for quite some time. Vowing to never let anything affect me that strongly again, this moon was known for being dangerous after all, I stood to investigate the scratching and sniffing that came from outside.

It was a lone viperwolf, scratching at the door of the small hut that housed the supplies. When I approached, it snarled at me and leaped away. I spent the rest of the evening exploring the camp more thoroughly and taking stock of the equipment and supplies at my disposal. If I was right, I would need to be completely self-sufficient.

The most delightful discovery for me as a mechanic was the AMP-suit I found underneath a tarp near the dig-site. It wasn't the standard combat version, but rather customized for heavy lifting and digging. It was squatting at the lip of the crater made by the team, great three-fingered shovel-hands placed on the ground in front of it, thus lowering the cockpit for easy access. I slept in there that night, the standing giant a safe fortress from nightly predators.

The next morning found me looking through the teams documents. They had located the buried lab and started the retrieval when they were called back. Now, I intended to finish the job, because the lab would provide me with an underground, and therefore safe, room for sleeping and storing my food. Also, it would hopefully still be airtight, creating a room for me to live without the exo-pack. The AMP was safe too, but it was much to small to live in.

By midday I had located the entrance and began to excavate it. Using the suit at first and later a shovel for the more delicate work around the hull, I removed the hard-packed dirt until the doorway and thus the airlock were free.

The rest of the evening I used for widening the hole and creating a ramp so I wouldn't have to climb each time I wanted to get to the labs entrance. This night, I was woken by a small pack of viperwolves tearing at the door of my food-storage. They fled after I had thrown the first that jumped the suit, but I realized that they would eventually steal my supply.

When the sun rose, I dragged a long cable down into the hole I made the day before. As the lab had been buried, the solar panels on its roof hadn't been able to generate power for a while now. The energy cells were drained and the door wouldn't open without energy. After I connected the cable I was finally able to take a look inside.

It was a veritable mess. Apparently the lab had tumbled more than one time when the landslide had claimed it. The roof was up at least, but the floor still showed a slope away from the entrance. Also, the furniture had piled itself in the corner that was the farthest from the airlock. Otherwise it seemed to have survived the ordeal with only marginal damages, being still airtight. The air was a bit stale, but that was to be expected after a while without ventilation.

After cleaning up the inside, stacking beds back to were they had stood previously and collecting the various binders and loose papers, I began relocating my food supplies from the hut into the lab. The crates were quite heavy, they hadn't been designed to be lifted alone and unassisted, but I had little choice if I didn't want to see my food eaten by the wildlife around me. I was happy to use the suit for the distance between the hut and the lab, carrying them myself would have taken much more time.

Hopefully those wolves wouldn't be able to demolish the steel doors of the airlock chambers, the door into the hut had been made from thin aluminum and the claw-marks were pretty deep.

With that out of the way, I used the next days to unearth the roof of the lab, taking the solar panels down, sealing the empty sockets and filling the hole once again. Then, I fastened the panels onto the frame of the radio-mast and led a cable from the panels back to the lab. This rig let me deactivate the generator as I didn't want to drain its, admittedly large, tank just yet.

That night, I vowed to bury the cable as soon as morning would come, because I had to fend off various herbivores that seemed to like chewing it. It must have smelled of something really delicious, but thankfully didn't take any damage besides a few holes and scratches in the outer layer.

After burying it a few feet deep the next morning, I sat down to sift through the notes and documents from the lab. Apparently the eggheads had been researching the flora around them. They had focused on the edibility of the various fruit and some strange 'neural connections' between the trees. The latter was beyond me, I knew that 'neural' was something about the brain, but the rest remained a mystery. The former was just what I had been searching for, I wasn't any good at hunting, but would still need something to eat. Those supplies I 'inherited' from the team would only last so long before they ran out.


	6. Chapter 5

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

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Two weeks passed quickly, scavenging fruit that had been deemed edible, building furniture from the dead wood downhill, and generally trying to make surviving easier and more comfortable. One day I accidentally ate the fruit the prolemuris had thrown at me at the beginning of my trip. I had just grabbed a couple fruit out of my pantry and started to eat them, saving the fleshy outer shell for my expeditions as trying to chew them was often like eating rubber, when I noticed that the fruit I had just finished two thirds of was the unknown one I had brought with me to the camp.

At first I was immensely worried. Had I just poisoned myself through carelessness? With some fruit, one had to take out the seeds before eating, because they contained the poison, others were wholly poisonous. Had I jeopardized my quest to survive until the next ISV arrived? I was sure there would be at least one other coming, one can't just turn them around and when one arrived, the next was already on its way. Still, would I die now, just a few weeks into my quest?

As it turned out, I didn't die. Didn't even get a little sick. I counted myself lucky and was even more careful about my food afterward. I also didn't store unknown fruit I wanted to have a look at together with known fruit I wanted to eat anymore.

The next day, I could hear bellowing and crashes nearing my camp. By the time I had gotten to the suit and started it up, a hammerhead had broken into the clearing further down the hill. It seemed to be smaller than the ones who had functioned as line-breakers against the RDA ground attack barely three weeks ago. I slowed my movements as I thought back. Had it really been just three weeks? Seemed more like a few months to me...

The sound of barking and hissing mingling with the deep bellows of the hammerhead brought me out of my thoughts. A pack of about fourteen viper-wolves had followed the hammerhead and pounced just as it stumbled on the suddenly uneven ground. I could only watch as its left legs folded underneath its body and it fell to the ground, squishing two of the small predators that had been on that side, trying to penetrate its hide with their claws. The others quickly swarmed over the fallen giant, trying to find a weak spot and begin their meal.

I couldn't let them feed. They'd be there for days and the only reason why they hadn't noticed me yet was their fixation on the hammerhead. So I rushed towards them, yelling through my suits speakers and waving its arms about. They only noticed me when I picked the first from the fallen beast and flung him into the trees. One after another, heads turned and snarled at the one who would dare to deny them their prey. When a second of their number went flying, one tried to leap at their attacker, fangs bared and snarling. I deflected him with the free arm and he crashed to the ground next to the prone hammerhead, slinking away as I continued screaming and throwing his kin back to the jungle. They bounced pretty well, considering their sinewy stature, and picked themselves up to run into the tree line as soon as they stopped rolling. The last four ran of their own accord, casting hungry looks back at the hammerhead I defended.

Now that I could take a better look at it, it was clear that its smaller size was because of it being a younger version of the beasts I saw three weeks ago. It seemed to have fallen unconscious from exhaustion or pain, considering that one half of the hammer at its forehead was bent backwards by about forty-five degrees and the bent part was swollen and an angry red in color. I wondered if it had run into a tree at full speed to receive that sort of damage, at least until I saw the metal embedded into the hard skin of its head.

I'd have recognized those parts anywhere, even as broken and splintered as they now where. They originated from the inner workings of a AMP-suits arm-servo. Apparently this beast had participated in the charge against the RDA line and found the suits it smashed to be a bit too resilient for its still hardening hammer.

Thinking about it, I realized that I would have to help it get better. It was in no condition to just walk away and if it stayed here, the viperwolves would surely return. While relatively safe in my suit, the idea to have to wear it all day irked me.

How does one go about helping a young hammerhead titanothere that managed to injure his hammer? None of the eggheads had written anything about this, as far as I knew anyway, and I somehow doubted that one of them had found themselves in a situation where they had to find out...

They did write that the hammer was mainly cartilage at the start and ossified during the maturing process. If that was true, my 'little' patient here looked like he had only just started maturing, then removing the swelling, returning the hammer to its old position and finally splinting the whole mess would probably do the trick.

The plan was easier to think up than to execute. First, I had to think of a way to reduce the swelling. I didn't trust the medications to work on just any life-form without side effects, so they were out. Draining the blood that caused the swelling was also out, as I didn't trust the hammerhead to not wake up during the process and draw the wrong conclusions. I finally settled on using ice, remembering how my mother had always used it whenever I hit my head somewhere. The fridge in the lab still worked, and I had been freezing cleaned water already. You never know when you might need clean water after all.

It took a few hours, but the swelling lessened. Very slowly. I wasn't very calm during that time, who knew how my patient would react, waking up to a metal thing, that had proven crunchy in the past, standing over him? He didn't wake though, so when I deemed the swelling to have lessened enough, I tried to bend the injured part of his hammer.


	7. Chapter 6

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

* * *

I woke to a pounding headache and the sight of the sky through armored glass. While I tried to orientate myself, I found that I was still strapped into the suit, but it was on its back and slowly rocked from side to side.

The rocking stopped as soon as I made the first movements and the titanothere's head appeared above me, tilted slightly as two golden-red eyes glared down at me. I froze in fear, I had watched these giants smash armored cockpits with ease just a few weeks ago, after all. When he didn't move, I tried to slowly crawl out from underneath him.

The moment I moved my arm, he turned away, walked a few meters and lay down, watching me. Having frozen again as he moved, I tried to stand up, but the suit wouldn't move its legs. Looking at the status-screen in front of me, I quickly noticed the problem. The hip-joint of the right leg read as damaged and the software had locked both legs and the hips to prevent further damage.

It was then that I remembered how this had started. As soon as I had tugged at the injured hammer, the attached animal had, with a loud bellow, woken from its unconsciousness and swung its head. The uninjured part had caught my suit directly under the cockpit and thrown me head over heels for the opposite side of the clearing. While tumbling, I must have hit my head somewhere inside the cockpit.

Now, while I had more than enough spare parts for the suit and the skills to use them, I would have to get out of the suit, look at the damage, walk back to the camp, find the parts and make it back to the suit. All while under the watchful gaze of a giant herbivore which could stomp me into the ground at any time.

Reasoning that it could have killed me easily during my own brief stint in morpheus' arms and would, hopefully, not just wait until I crawled out of my crunchy shell, I put on my exopack and opened the canopy.

When the hammerhead didn't move, I slowly climbed out, complimenting myself on the foresight to put some tools into the cockpit, and went around the suit. The joint was completely smashed up. The upper end of the thigh had taken the brunt of the blow, but the thigh itself had only a small dent. Instead of breaking it had, while being moved backwards by force, ripped out the connectors and fiber-optics for the sensors and actuators down the leg, even bending the titanium-alloy of the load-bearing axis that connected the leg to the rest of the suit.

The first thing to do was removing all the damaged parts, which was actually easier due to the supine position of the suit. This way, I didn't have to find a way to hold up the bulk of the suit while removing one of its legs. Opening up the armor on the bottom of the cockpit, I was relieved to find that the fiber-optics had just been ripped out of their sockets, not torn off, as one can't just splice them back together like regular copper cables.

That left the mechanical connectors and the axis. I went to the camp to get the replacements, rooting around inside the crates some time until I found the right ones. Standard RDA thinking, if you field expensive vehicles, build them sturdy and send enough spare parts to build at least two new ones.

That a field crew wouldn't have the time nor the mind to catalogue where each part was, never crossed their minds. As long as you could give each part back to the Quartermaster or at least point out where on your vehicle you replaced anything broken, they were happy. And if something broke, you faced a stack of paperwork. Where did it break, under which circumstances, describe the part, which serial number did it have and, the most absurd form ever, please sign here for your guarantee that no toddlers were involved in the breaking.

Needless to say, I was happy to have an abundance of parts and, due to a distinctive lack of superior officers, no paperwork following my using of them. For the first time I was really happy about being stranded.

I became less happy upon stepping outside to the sight of one hammerhead standing over my partially disassembled AMP-suit, apparently doing an up-close examination of the field of tools and scrapped parts spread around the hip joint.

Since yelling and running would probably result in my quick transition into a pink, mushy paste, I merely jogged back to the suit. Still not easy with the parts in my arms, because while sturdy, they're really heavy too.

As I approached, the hammerhead looked up and ambled around the field, so that the scraps stayed between him and me. Warily, I placed my parts on the ground and began rebuilding the joint, every minute or so casting a glance over my shoulder to see if the hammerhead had moved. He just stood there and watched me work, though.

When I was finished with replacing the axis, I heard a quiet snort from behind me. Whirling around, I saw that the hammerhead had not moved. But while I was watching, he looked at the ground and extended one its antennae to nudge a warped steel strut towards me. When I just looked between him and the strut, he nudged the strut again.

I turned around, dug an undamaged copy out of my pile of spares and put that down next to the warped one, waiting for a reaction. He seemed satisfied to just look at the pair, so I turned back to my work. The next time I looked, he had shifted them around, apparently to look at them from another angle.

While I worked, we repeated this process a few times. A snort to gain my attention, nudging a piece of scrap until I produced a sound copy of the part and an investigation of the differences between the two.

Shortly after I took the strut I had shown him back to install it in the joint, a shadow fell over me. I froze as I didn't have a doubt to just who created the shadow. I was proven right as an antenna curled over my shoulder and tapped the wrench I was using to fasten the bolts around the base of the strut.

Now I was baffled. The database hadn't mentioned anything about this level of curiosity. But I dutifully showed him the wrench and then grabbed the strut and give it a good tug. As the bolts weren't that tight yet, it moved visibly in my hand. I resumed my work and tugged again after I had finished. The strut didn't move at all.

After this demonstration, the hammerhead didn't interrupt me anymore, but he stayed close and watched me work.

When I had finished, it was mid-afternoon and I still had to find a few about twenty feet long poles and some rope to splint the head of my 'little' friend. The poles were relatively easy, young trees are in abundance in a jungle, the rope was a bit problematic. After I remembered that the Na'vi use razor palm fronds for their velcro-like underside, I tried to recall where exactly on my foraging expeditions I had seen a grove of razor palms...

When I got there, it turned out to be a struggle to find fronds long enough to fit around the hammer. But even that was solved once I had navigated deep enough into the grove to locate several older plants. The arms and hands of the suit were full of scratches afterwards, nothing deep, just enough so the dulled metal began to gleam, but it served me as a reminder of just how sharp razor palm fronds are.

* * *

Getting the hammerhead to allow me to strap wood to his head wasn't easy, especially since he seemed to derive some kind of pleasure from bumping his head into me with just the right amount of force to topple the suit!

Standing up for the fifth time in thirty minutes, I thumped the injured part of his hammer with a fist. The wince and gasp the hammerhead emitted was enough for me to know that the injury still hurt, even if he acted like it didn't. Demonstrating how the young trees I had been trying to tie around his head didn't bend when I hit them, I was rewarded with a tilted head. Taking that as encouragement, I stepped forward and, as he held still this time, began to wrap the palm fronds around his hammer. After I had loosely tied two fronds on the right and two on the left side, I took the poles and, one by one, slid them in between the hammer and the fronds.

When I was finished, my patient shook his head as if unsatisfied with the added weight, but he didn't wince anymore when I hit the injured half of his hammer. The revenge followed on the spot though, as I landed on my back once again.

* * *

That evening, while I shared a large part of my stored fruit with my patient, I saw the first woodsprite. It came out of the jungle, danced across the length of my patients hammer, settled shortly on the canopy of my suit and finally vanished into the trees again.


	8. Chapter 7

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

* * *

My 'little' friend vanished into the jungle two days later. I didn't see him for a few weeks, but I occasionally heard splintering trees and the deep bellows he emitted.

I spent my time foraging for edible fruit and extracting the seeds to plant them elsewhere. The border between my clearing and the jungle was already blurring as several species ventured out into the clear space.

I made sure to plant small copses of fruit-bearing plants close to my camp as I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep the green flood away from it. The single flame-thrower I had, would run out of fuel long before I was rescued. Fuel that was much more useful for the generator anyway.

A week later, I began to build a fence around a selected part of bare dirt, disassembling the original camp in the process. I had used up or relocated the supplies it sheltered and I had to witness the small shoots of the plants I had sown being eaten by several hexapedes. Thus, I intended to use the fenced area as a sort of greenhouse.

One day, while I knelt on the ground trying to dislodge a particularly stubborn fruit, I suddenly noticed a presence behind me. Whirling around, I came face-to-eye with a hammerhead titanothere.

I recoiled in shock, how the hell could such a massive creature be so very stealthy?

Then, I noticed the splintered wooden poles hanging from its hammer. As he turned his head so that the hammer faced me, I surveyed the remnants of my work. Of the four razor palm fronds, only one was still in place, holding the splintered remains of the two poles I had tied to the top of his hammer. The three fixed to the front, to cushion blows, had obviously not withstood the hardships of his daily life. Not surprising, considering that hammerheads were known for smashing trees just to mark their territory. And he had apparently been very active around my clearing.

The hammer itself seemed to have healed nicely, only a small kink indicating which half he had managed to injure. As he lowered his head into my range, I took out my knife and cut the remaining frond away.

Immediately, I jumped backwards to escape the flying wood as he shook his head. After that he snorted at me, turned around and vanished into the undergrowth.

Over the next weeks, it turned into a sort of game. He managed to ambush me quite often during my expeditions, but eventually I learned to interpret the signs and sharpen my hearing. After the first time that I turned to face him just as he cleared the last bush, I started to go out into the jungle at odd intervals to try and ambush him myself. Turnabout is fair play after all.

It was during one of those tries that I suddenly found myself running from a pack of viperwolves I had tried to circumvent for the last fifteen minutes. Very soon, I left the area I had explored during my foraging expeditions, meaning that I had to watch where I was going more than normally.

Wouldn't do to step on a mine pod or run into a scorpion thistle and make the work even easier for the viperwolves.

Finally, I spotted a small clearing ahead and decided to head there as it would remove at least one angle of attack from the pack. Watching for attacks on the ground was bad enough, but viperwolves like to walk along the branches and suspended roots above human headlevel too.

As I cleared the last fern, I had a brief impression of a tall, green-grey pillar with a wide base standing in the middle of the clearing before I tripped over something and face-planted on the ground.

Something flew above me and from behind me sounded a shrill, painful howl that ended abruptly with a thump immediately afterwards. Rolling onto my back, I realized that I couldn't hear the hunting calls of the viperwolves anymore. Looking up, I saw them milling about in the trees and on the ground outside the clearing. On the ground inside was the unmoving body of one of their number.

As I watched, the green-blue moss that seemed to cover the ground in this clearing grew upwards and engulfed the carcass until it was just a slight bulge in the ground-cover. Looking around, I saw two similar bulges just inside the border.

Figuring that I was safe for the moment, the moss didn't seem to be interested in me and the viperwolves kept their distance, I investigated the pillar. It was a plant, about thirteen feet tall and, like the cacti on Earth, covered in thorns. Just that these thorns were two feet long and covered in wicked barbs.

The base of the plant was without thorns, instead there sprouted, half-buried in the moss that grew along the base, several fruits that looked familiar. I had never seen this plant before, not even read anything about them in the database, so I was quite puzzled as to where I had seen these fruits.

I knelt and tried to get one out to have a closer look at it. I couldn't get it lose at first, soon bracing my elbow against the pillar-base as a lever and then recoiling as a stinging pain radiated from my forearm. Sitting back, I investigated it. The pain had vanished as suddenly as it had started, and the skin looked just slightly irritated. Perhaps I had brushed it against some poisonous leaves during my flight from the wolves?

Putting that matter aside I again pulled with all my might at the stubborn fruit... And fell over backwards when it came off easily.

Examining the fruit, I realized that it looked exactly like the one a prolemuris had thrown at me all those weeks ago. The one I had eaten while not paying attention to my food selection almost three weeks later...

This was significant, because a) I had finally found which plant that fruit had come from, and b) normally the fruit I found around my clearing tended to rot if one didn't eat them two or three days after collecting them.

I had been unable to find a way to create food stocks that lasted longer then five days, because keeping them in the hollow I had dug into the earth beyond the second airlock of my lab module seemed to slow the rotting process somewhat. Now, if I managed to grow this type of plant anywhere near my clearing, I would be able to build up a store, just in case that I would ever be unable to go foraging.

That just reminded me of another problem. Getting home. The viperwolves didn't seem to dare enter the clearing, but they just waited in the surrounding brush. If I left, the chase would continue. Thankfully, the direction wouldn't be an issue. After getting lost twice during my expeditions, I had installed a small transmitter from the lab on top of the radio mast. With the small, handheld receiver I would be able to locate my clearing. I had found both while clearing up the mess inside the lab, apparently they were normally used to track animals, but I needed an easy way to find back home.

The short version: I had to wait a day before the pack left, probably to find a prey that wasn't as well-protected. Before they left, another member of the pack tried to get at me, confirming my suspicion about the death of the first one in the process. As soon as he closed to a certain distance, the pillar behind me shot one of its thorns at him, killing him nearly instantly as the thorn impaled his chest, the moss quickly covering the body.

Apparently the plant supplemented the carnivorous moss with easy prey, probably getting its share of nutrients due to connected roots. Or something. I'm not a biologist.

That just left the question of why I wasn't attacked by the plant and how the prolemuris, or any other herbivorous species for that matter, managed to get at the fruits the plant grew at its base.

After the pack had left, I went back to my clearing. Once there, I tried to find the seeds inside the fruits I had taken with me. During my stay, I had eaten two of them and, when I couldn't find any seeds, just thought that they were too small to see with the naked eye. Pandoran plants could get **very** creative on how to conceal their seeds. Even searching several slices with the microscope from the lab didn't yield any results though.

* * *

About half a week later, my forearm went from irritated, reddish skin to bumps with a dark center. When I first noticed them, I tried to squeeze one of them to eject the contained material, but the pain lancing up my arm quickly discouraged that. Later that day, I tried to cut it open...

I dropped the knife as white hot agony burned through my arm. Also, through the haze, I noticed the shallow cut I had managed to create, oozed a clear liquid that quickly hardened. Not a mark remained after a few minutes.

After that experience, I decided to leave the bumps be, the pain just wasn't worth it.

The bumps and the dark stuff inside slowly grew over the next few days, spreading to cover the outer half of my forearm. Then, one morning, I woke to a fierce itch on my forearm. Still half asleep, I scratched at it...

The dry crackle and the feeling of material crumbling away beneath my fingers woke me up nearly instantly. The skin stretching over the strange growth was dry and crumbled at the slightest touch, revealing what looked like dark-brown scales underneath.

Pulling on them hurt like I tried to pull out my hair, and cutting them with the knife just scratched them, so I eventually decided to leave them be. It wasn't worth the time and pain to pull them out, as opposed to gaining a apparently harmless protection for my arm.

In the end, it just took two days before they started to fall out by themselves.

Considering that I had gotten them, indirectly, from the plant I found, I followed up on a hunch and sowed a few in my 'greenhouse'. A few days later, I was rewarded with the first saplings.

It was clear that I could only collect the fruit after I had been stung by the plant, apparently implanting me with its seeds. An effective, if disturbing, way to ensure the scattering of seeds over a big area, considering the wide area pandoran herbivores covered in their search of food.

Still didn't answer why I wasn't attacked or how those herbivores would get close enough to get at the fruit though. Maybe because they, and I, don't smell of blood? But why would a carnivorous plant only target carnivorous species?


	9. Chapter 8

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

**Also: I'm sorry for the long wait, but college has started again and I'm quite busy... I'll update whenever I find the time.**

* * *

Months passed. I got better and better at moving in the jungle, stalking viperwolf packs and hexapede herds for a challenge. The frequent flights, either by me, or the stalking victim, depending on which of the two I had been stalking, became less and less.

My hammerhead friend had found a small group of his own species a few kilometers to the north of my home, and (from the scars I had seen) apparently fought with their alpha male. Despite not winning, a smaller female had followed him when he retreated...

Gave me a mighty scare, suddenly being bumped from behind after turning to meet his approach. Also, I had forgotten that titanothere males change the color of the fans on their heads when they become alpha. I worried for days over his 'sickness', until I found that parts of the egghead database were on the computer inside my lab.

My clearing... wasn't a clearing anymore. While not a part of the forest just yet, small trees were growing all over the former wasteland. I had been busy with landscaping though.

Thinking to increase my safety around my home, I had placed saplings of the strange pillar-plant in a rough, wide circle around the lab's entrance and they grew quite fast. The moss I had found around their parent seemed to have been carried over somehow, as it started to grow around them as soon as they developed their first thorns.

Inside this circle, I planted the various fruit-bearing species I had tried to grow earlier. A hungry tapirus attempted to get at the small saplings two days later. When it got between two of the 'Guardians' as I began calling the species after that incident, they peppered it with thorns. Not a clean kill as I had witnessed with the older specimen, just disabling the legs at the joints. I rushed there and finished it quickly with my knife, not wanting its shrill cries to attract any larger predators.

In the minute I had before the growing moss began to lift my hands away from the corpse, I noticed that both had at least attempted for a clean kill. One thorn was stuck in each flank, right above the lungs, but apparently the force hadn't been enough to punch through the leather-like hide. It was an amazing discovery, not only had the plants judged their shots as non-lethal, they had then struck at weaker points and all that with a speed and accuracy one wouldn't expect from a species without any kind of eyes.

Also, the killing of the tapirus killed my theory about these plants. I had thought them to spare herbivores to ensure the spreading of their seeds. Obviously, they did not.

When the slowly developing carpet of grass eventually reached the ramp I had created to access my lab more easily, I decided to cover it up. Wouldn't do for someone to find my camp and steal my stuff while I was out in the jungle.

While I somehow doubted that the natives would actually steal my stuff and they would surely spot any camouflage I could come up with, I also didn't want to be found as easily as it was possible now. As far as I knew they'd kill me on sight, what with the (justified?) grudge against my species and all.

First, I used wood and sheet metal from the old camp to create the roof of a tunnel, ending just before said roof would be visible above ground-level. Then, I filled the remaining space with earth, going from the visible ramp to a tunnel entrance.

I wanted to cover that with a woven mat and let the grass grow over it for camouflage, but it took days until I managed to create a cohesive mat with my nonexistent weaving skills. In the end, it looked like a pile of rotting wood, because I had experimented with different leaves and vines.

Next, my clothing gave out. I had rotated my own clothing from the day we crashed with several pieces I found in supply crates, but after months in the warm, wet jungle, they were rotting and some had even gained a fine coat of mildew.

I had to fashion myself some new clothes. I didn't have any cloth though. And weaving was, looking back at the mat I had fumbled together, clearly not my forte. The sewing, I could do, as it was a skill necessary to survive in the military. You constantly had to sew. Buttons came lose or fell of, your name tag wouldn't stay on the 'self-adhesive' patch on your jacket and so on...

I earned a pretty penny, sewing stuff for people that weren't able to, or were plainly too lazy to be bothered (I always overcharged those).

Once more, I decided to take my cue from the Na'vi, taking the leaves of the Beanstalk Palm for my clothes. However, due to my deficient weaving skills, I took whole leaves, sewing them together instead of weaving their fibers. It looked strange, almost like plants growing on me and wrapping around my body, but the new 'clothes' had a few perks too.

I soon discovered that my attempts at stalking had taken a huge leap forwards. Not only did the clothes act as camouflage, apparently their smell covered my own as I was able to crawl almost next to a grazing hexapede, only afterwards realizing that I hadn't thought of the wind direction and my scent had been blown towards it. Although it seemed to be nervous, checking the air every few moments, it didn't flee until I tried to withdraw and accidentally put my leg on a dry twig.

Also, the tough leaves protected my from various scrapes, tumbling down the small embankment at the small stream I got my drinking water from or falling into a small cluster of thorny bushes (courtesy of my 'little' titanothere friend's 'pushy nature').

Needless to say, I created 'beanstalk clothes' from then on. They started to get limp and brown after about a week, when I created a new set and put the old ones as fertilizer into my 'greenhouse'. Now, I never made more than I needed, just two sets per week. One with lots of pockets for fruit-collecting and the other, with added leaves from other bushes around my clearing, for my stalking exercises. They weren't pretty, or overly comfortable, but they were sturdy and useful.

* * *

It was about a year after the battle when I saw the first Na'vi since fleeing from the fiasco beneath the Halleluja Mountains.

When I was working in the base, all I ever saw were the information broadcasts in the mess hall and the long arrows and/or the scratch marks of deflected ones on the AMP-suits I was servicing. Oh, and the occasional dead or (very rare) heavily wounded men that managed to get back behind the fence after one of the attacks.

As a result, my first real impressions of the natives had been gained during the rush on the Tree of Souls. Shadows moving with speed through the underbrush, being cut down by automatic fire. This time, I had the time to truly observe one of them.

I had been stalking a hexapede from a thick field of large ferns when it was suddenly nailed to the ground by a large arrow. I didn't have to look twice to guess that it was made by Na'vi hands.

While I froze, only daring to move my eyes, a blue giant jumped down from above and approached the freshly deceased animal. Crouching over it, he murmured something in his strange tongue, closing his eyes and looking almost regretful, before he pulled out the arrow, stood back up and slung the carcass over his broad shoulders, walking away between the trees.

The whole affair took maybe one or two minutes and the only trace left behind was a small puddle of blood on the ground, which vanished after a minute, seeping into the soil.

When I returned to my home that day, I deeply worried about the hunters this near to my hideout. It had been pure luck that he hadn't discovered me, of that I was sure. Then, stepping into the fading light of my clearing (Even though the young trees were twice as tall as me now, this place would probably always be 'my clearing' to me) I witnessed a strange sight:

On each guardian of the circle I had planted, a single woodsprite sat. After a few moments, as if reacting to a hidden signal, they took flight simultaneously, drifting away beneath the canopy.

* * *

**R&R, please... In addition, if you see any grammatical errors, please tell me. I'll remove them.**


	10. Chapter 9

**The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?**

* * *

For two weeks after witnessing the hunt, I avoided trips into the jungle as much as possible. If I had to go, I did so with an even higher level of awareness to try and spot Na'vi before they detected me. But all I ever saw was one hunter flying his banshee over the tree tops. He was moving away from me, but I still laid several false tracks on my way home as a precaution.

The weeks flew by while I steadily improved my skills at stalking and orientation in the jungle. I ranged pretty far and could find my way back on landmarks alone, only once having to use my little tracker as I got lost.

One day, I had been practicing walking on the wooden 'streets' above ground-level, I even saw a thanator. It had been drinking from the stream I got my own water from when I arrived on a branch further downstream and (thankfully) had its back turned to me.

I immediately dropped into a crouch, displaying the upright beanstalk palm leaves I had stuck to the back of my jacket and raising my arms to create the rough illusion of a small patch of young beanstalk palms.

This tactic had proven successful in the past in shaking the pursuit of a small viperwolf pack, which had charged past me, only about fifty meters later noticing that they had lost my scent. By which time I had been making a stealthy escape in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately, a thanators nose is apparently much keener than a viperwolfs. The giant head turned like a tank turret, occasionally stopping to sniff the air until it stared right at me. It isn't easy to maintain a steady stance while staring into pure black eyes, being promised a messy death by that stare.

I don't know how long I sat like a marble statue, a thanator staring into my eyes.

The spell was abruptly broken by a small herd of tapirus breaking cover on the opposite shore of the stream. They turned on the spot and had they not produced the panicked squealing and bleating, they might even have escaped the thanators notice.

As it was, it was among them in a flash and I fled, not even waiting to see if it got any of them, just happy at having escaped.

I actually saw the thanator again about a month later, just a flowing black form amongst the trees several hundreds of meters distant, there and gone in a few seconds, myself observing the area from a large tree for any Na'vi activity.

* * *

I hadn't seen any Na'vi for a while and despite the danger of being discovered, I had the feeling that I should have seen something if there was a camp nearby, as I had suspected at first after seeing that hunter taking his kill. So I went looking for traces.

I started my search at the spot where I had witnessed the hunter shooting the hexapede, looking further and further until I reached the border of the area I knew from my 'expeditions'. I hesitated a bit before venturing further, now not only looking for Na'vi tracks but also for landmarks and the telltale signs of entering a viperwolf hunting range.

After about an hour of searching I spied a woven mat, spanning the room between two trees and thus creating a wall. From another direction it became obvious that it was part of a small shed with the typical Na'vi architecture of using naturally enclosed spaces and closing them further by mounting mats in the holes. Carefully closing in, I noticed more of these sheds scattered around a bare spot without any undergrowth.

The camp was deserted. Everything was very tidy, I found a few baskets and pots filled with clean tools but left everything as it was. No reason to leave obvious tracks. A few spots of disturbed soil yielded pots with preserved meat and a few of the longer-lasting fruit I discovered, which I carefully re-buried for the same reason.

But the real goal of my inspection, finding out if the camp was recently in use, I couldn't achieve. While my self-taught tracking skills were quite formidable by now, I didn't know the first thing about the hunting behavior of Na'vi. There had been nothing in the database and despite the ground inside the camp being bare dirt, I found very few foot prints. While I thought that they looked old, I couldn't be sure.

My sense of hearing had improved with the time I spent stalking and I had learned to distinguish the sounds of moving beings from the normal noise of the jungle. That was the only reason I reacted to the cracking sound of a breaking twig. Even before the scolding could arise on the opposite side of the camp, I had already thrown myself into the jungle and was seeking out one of the beanstalk patches I had discovered all around the camps perimeter while scouting it out and looking for possible occupants.

From the safety of my camouflage, I looked back into the camp, just in time to witness four male Na'vi, two teens and two adults, entering. One of the boys looked shamed, the adult behind him clearly explaining something. He probably had forgotten his training for a moment, making the noise that had saved me from being discovered.

I was forced to sit still and watch as they unpacked their bags and started taking inventory. I would be unable to make my escape without being noticed. Not at this distance. And I wasn't sure if I could shake pursuit by Na'vi, which were probably much more proficient at moving in the jungle than me, even after my year of self-teaching. Nonetheless I started plotting a route, based on my knowledge of the surrounding area.

I wanted to make a near beeline for the river I had heard while searching for the camp, which was my best bet for escaping since I figured that any pursuer would probably look for my tracks. And a swimming being is much harder to track than a running one.

While I had been plotting, one of the adults had apparently discovered that one of the baskets had to be replaced, as he emptied it and then spoke to the scolded teen. The only word I recognized was 'tautral', meaning 'sky tree', the Na'vi name for the Beanstalk palm. The youth left the camp, quietly muttering to himself as he approached the grove I had taken shelter in.

I silently cursed to myself. Of all the groves he could have chosen... I froze in my position, hoping that he would overlook me and just take some leaves from the outer fringe of the grove. But apparently Mr. Murphy was in attendance as the teen waded into the grove, plucking leaves as he went, sometimes not even looking. He passed by me, nearly touching my leg and _plucking one of the leaves I used for camouflage from my suit_.

I didn't dare moving, but I heard him rustling around behind me, finally coming back after about two minutes. This time, he stumbled over my leg and just barely saved himself from a faceplant by dropping the collected leaves and catching his fall just in time. Two sets of eyes, one brown, the other golden, connected and time seemed to stand still.

After an indeterminable amount of time, an impatient shout from the camp broke us from our shock. I watched his chest swell as he started to draw a deep breath. By the time he actually yelled, I was already running for the river.

* * *

**As I said, I'm quite busy. Sorry for the long wait...**

**Also: R&R, please... In addition, if you see any grammatical errors, please tell me. I'll remove them.**


End file.
